Antitrust involves the prohibition of anti-competitive and unfair business practices, such as the restriction of free-trade among business entities, and the related supervision of corporate mergers and acquisitions. In the United States, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are the primary institutions that determine whether to interfere on antitrust grounds.

With the change in administration and consequent majority control of the federal government by the Democratic Party, there are mounting fears of increased antitrust enforcement. Over the past year, antitrust attorneys have criticized mergers like XM-Sirius, Yahoo-Microsoft, and the business practices of Intel. Whether similar events will be more scrutinized in an Obama Administration remains to be seen.

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John McCain’s presidential campaign is sidestepping heat in what they now call a “boneheaded” statement by one of the campaign’s top economic policy advisors. The gaffe occurred September 16 while discussing McCain’s economic experiences on the Commerce Committee during his years in the Senate. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the campaign’s senior domestic policy adviser, reached in his pocket and held up his BlackBerry cell phone.

“Telecommunications of the United States, the premiere innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” Holtz-Eakin quipped.

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Terry Childs, the 43-ear-old disgruntled San Francisco network administrator who hijacked the city’s network by withholding the its pass codes, has given them to San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, after having refused to reveal them for more than a week. Without the codes, city administrators would have had to reconfigure the network, a time-consuming and costly process.

The codes gave Childs exclusive access to the City’s FiberWAN network, which carries around 60 percent of the government’s network, including the law enforcement, payroll, officials’ e-mails, and jail-booking records; the network could still run, but only Childs could configure it. He also apparently “booby trapped” the system, so that key files would have been destroyed had the system been shut down or lost power. A system shutdown had been scheduled for Saturday, July 19, for routine maintenance.

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